Rivera

When the officials of the Detroit Art Institute found they had a large room with a sky light, a very beautiful iron door-way at one end, a fish pond in the middle with plants of all kinds around it, quite a few hard seats, walls that were unsuitable for hanging pictures and antique tapestries didn't add a thing--they had to decide how to use it. They decided it needed a very large mural covering the entire wall and that idea was a headache for quite a while.

I don't know what the architect had in mind, but to me, the room looked like it belonged to a library. A few soft chairs and couches would have made it an ideal reading and study room--very restful and a guy could have snoozed over a good book all afternoon.

Edsel Ford, a really cultured young man, with a real understanding of what had happened to Detroit and its people, offered to pay for it and even to suggest the artist who could analyze Detroit of this period and put it on the walls in mural form. At his suggestion, with the help of a committee, he picked Rivera, a Mexican, with a leaning toward socialism or communism who was modern in his technique and imagination. He studied Detroit and I think he really go the real Detroit atmosphere and made his sketches and then the noise started.

The Common Council had to O.K. the idea and sketches--knowing little but how to get votes and keep everybody happy in their wards, were scared to death and handed the matter over to the supposedly cultural groups in Detroit and forgot about it.

I do not know what other cultured groups advised the Common Council to do. I know what the Scarab Club did, as I was a member of the board of directors and liked the mural and pulled for its acceptance. When the board had this mural proposition before them it turned out to be quite a riot--it had lots of enemies who looked upon it as communistic propaganda, and that Rivera was a lousy artist to them, and didn't know how to draw but eventually it came to a vote. The artists who were for it won by a small majority and the secretary was notified to write to the Common Council of our verdict. Somebody gummed the works--it seems the letter was written but somebody forgot to mail it--which put the Scarab Club in the same category as the Common Council and made my red hair stand on end worse than ever. It's such things that take the curl out of a man's hair.

After a lot of wrangling, the Common Council O.K.'d the mural with their tongues in their cheeks, but they never put up a brass tablet announcing the fact--as they did in the Rackham Golf Course with a brass tablet, with each alderman's name about an inch high, telling that they had accepted the course for all the people. It proves that some people get their names on plaques without dying, really doing nothing but sign their name on a piece of paper.

Rivera when to work, as I was a friend of Clyde Burroughs (secretary of the Art Institute and a great secretary who had lots of ideas but never left them out of his head which is an ideal way to remain a secretary) I could go in and watch Rivera lay out his mural on the wall. Believe me it was very interesting to see the layout grow on the wall with all its rhythm, lines forming a wonderful flowing design over all the walls. I personally think it was more interesting and beautiful in that form.

After that the design was traced in small sections on large sheets of thin paper and it was all ready to put on the wall with the addition of color.

Although the mural was modern in conception, the real painting was done with methods used through the years. This is a very laborious one requiring the artist to put colors in wet plaster making the color really a part of the wall and practically indestructible. Special plaster was used and special artisans mixed the plaster and put a small section on the wall during the night, the helpers or artists traced it on the plaster and Rivera painted that one section during the daylight hours. Changing any portion was next to impossible, and it meant the plaster had to be chipped out and re-plastered again and Rivera painted it over.

I can't remember how long it took him to finish it. It was quite a time as all the palette he used was a chine plate with paint around the edges and very few brushes and was painted in kind of a dry brush style.

He was a big man, around three hundred pounds, and the scaffold was strongly built as the work was all his and a fall would have been a real tragedy.

I think it was the kind of a mural Edsel Ford wanted, and it certainly portrayed Detroit as I saw and felt it--many of my relatives and friends worked in these production plants. The presses and machines were not mechanically correct but the whole picture with muscular men with not-thinking faces, of all colors and races, pulling levers and handling automatic tools were truthful in conception. The smaller panels suggested that natural materials were a necessity in these operation, others suggesting the food was needed and that the working men should get enough, another showed that life was being renewed with children born to work on the future production lines.

One thing I missed was the portrayal of music and the arts but maybe Rivera didn't see or hear any and naturally left it out.

I heard a lot of criticism of this mural, but I never heard any body suggest an artist who could have done a better job. I have a feeling that a mural showing Cadillac, his boat on the Detroit River, lots of Indians with lots of feathers--or maybe a mural with a few nudes (with veils in the right places) in the foreground and scenery with castles and mountains that suggested the countries our workers came from would have satisfied the average Detroiter a little better. From my point of view, it's a swell picture and a truthful picture of that period of Detroit. The Art Institute will verify the fact that thousands of people came to Detroit just to see those murals and many drop in to see them while in Detroit for other reasons.

We should be grateful to Edsel Ford, and to Rivera, for his portrayal of this period although I doubt whether they themselves liked that kind of a period.